Today we face a climate of ever increasing misdirection by popular media. This site, along with others, aims to reveal the reality of America and the loss of fact inherent to the over riding theme of our current political and social confusion: Purposeful deception.

Friday, November 11, 2011

We Brought Fukushima Disaster on Ourselves, MurakAmi Asserts

Contributed by Sherwood Ross

S. Paul note: How much of this testimony could be echoed in response or lack thereof, to the lax policies and practices of this nation's nuclear agencies when a similar disaster occurs here? Given the very real threat of a nuclear meltdown of our own in one of the numerous, aging nuclear plants across this country, we are not as far as most would hope from suffering a similar fate.

Terming FukushimaJapan's
"second massive nuclear disaster," novelist Haruki Murakami said
"this time no one dropped a bomb on us" but instead "we set the
stage, we committed the crime with our own hands, we are destroying our own
lands, and we are destroying our own lives."

"While we are the
victims, we are also the perpetrators. We must fix our eyes on this fact,"
he continued. "If we fail to do so, we will inevitably repeat the same
mistake again, somewhere else."

Murakami, whose novels
"Norwegian Wood" and "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," among
others, have given him a global following, made his comments in an interview
with Evan Osnos which appears in the Oct. 17th issue of "The New
Yorker" magazine.

Osnos writes about the
Japanese response to the March 11th earthquake and the subsequent tidal waves
that rocked the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Station on Japan's Pacific
coast.

He quotes then Prime
Minister Naoto Kan as saying that he felt
"Japan
was facing the possibility of a collapse." Kan,
64, resigned last August amid widespread criticism that he had mishandled the Fukushima crisis.

As journalist Walter Brasch
summarized in OpEdNews November 9th: "an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the
Richter scale and the ensuing 50-foot high tsunami wave led to a meltdown of
three of Japan's
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. Japan's nuclear regulatory agency
reported that 31 radioactive isotopes were released. In contrast, 16
radioactive isotopes were released from the A-bomb that hit Hiroshima Aug. 6, 1945. The agency also
reported that radioactive cesium released was almost 170 times the amount of
the A-bomb, and that the release of radioactive Iodine-131 and Strontium-90 was
about two to three times the level of the A-bomb."

The Fukushima tragedy caused the operators of
most of the world's 432 nuclear power plants to reassess their safety systems,
or to suspend nuclear power generation entirely. Some countries, Osnos says,
earlier had suspended nuclear ops as too dangerous following the April, 1986,
meltdown at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine.

Soviet officials attempted
to conceal the meltdown but disclosure came when its wind-borne radioactive
plume tripped a monitoring device in a nuclear plant north of Stockholm. Fukushima
officials were far more candid last March but the areas they said needed to be
evacuated were smaller than those U.S.
officials told their nationals in Japan to quit.

One casualty of the Fukushima meltdown was candor: Prime MinisterKan's
spokesman Yukio Edano said, "Let me repeat that there is no radiation
leak, nor will there be a leak." Osnos writes, "After the tsunami,
Tokyo Electric barred rank-and-file employees from speaking publicly, and the
ban is still in effect." He adds that a poll late in May showed that more
than 80 per cent of the population "did not believe the government's
information about the nuclear crisis."

"The Fukushima
meltdowns scattered nuclear fallout over an area the size of Chicago,"
Osnos continued, and government scientists estimated total radiation released
on land was about a sixth as much as at Chernobyl.
In a preliminary estimate, Frank von Hippel, a PrincetonUniversity physicist, said that
roughly a thousand deadly cancers may result from the Fukushima meltdowns. Luckily, significant radioactive
fallout allegedly did not reach Tokyo,
the world's largest metropolitan area with 35-million inhabitants. Some 80,000
Japanese living near the plant site were forced to evacuate their homes,
though, converting some lovely villages into ghost towns.

Despite all this, Japanese
politicians are not about to put an end to generating nuclear power in there
country. Osnos writes, "The country would possibly close some
of its oldest plants, but the rest---by one estimate, 36 of the 54 reactors---would
endure."

He quotes Economics Minister
Kaoru Yosano as saying, "We thought that human beings---the Japanese---can
control nuclear by our intelligence, by our reason. With this one accident,
will that philosophy be discarded? I don't think so." He added that he
expects China
to build "a hundred or two hundred" nuclear power stations,
concluding, "I hope our experience will be a good lesson for them."

Maybe Fukushima
will cause Japan's
nuclear owners to take warnings more seriously. Tokyo Electric in 2009 disregarded
warnings by two seismologists that Fukushima Daiichi was acutely vulnerable to
tsunamis. In addition, Tokyo Electric endangered the public by concealing more
than half a dozen emergencies from government regulators. It had also
"faked hundreds of repair records," Osnos noted.

This pattern of deception on
safety issues raises the question of how many "accidents" it will
take before Japan
reverses course on nuclear power. Also, aren't those who suffer from radiation
and who are driven from their homes entitled to compensation from Tokyo
Electric? When a private firm with such an awesome responsibility for public
health covers up emergencies and is unprepared for a disaster, isn't it guilty
of crimes against humanity?

Even absent earthquakes and
tidal waves, nuclear plants pose an existential threat to humanity. Not only
are vast amounts of fossil fuels burned to mine and refine the uranium for
nuclear reactors, polluting the atmosphere, but nuclear plants are allowed
"to emit hundreds of curies of radioactive gases and other radioactive
elements into the environment every year," Dr. Helen Caldicott, the
antinuclear authority, points out in her book "Nuclear Power Is Not the
Answer" (The New Press).

The thousands of tons of
solid radioactive waste accumulating in the cooling pools next to those plants
contain "extremely toxic elements that will inevitably pollute the
environment and human food chains, a legacy that will lead to epidemics of
cancer, leukemia, and genetic disease in populations living near nuclear power
plants or radioactive waste facilities for many generations to come," she
writes. Countless Americans are already dead or dying as a result of our
nuclear plants, a story not being effectively told.

Americans have been told
there were no casualties as a result of the Three Mile Island (TMI) plant
meltdown on March 28, 1979. Yet some 2,000 Harrisburg area residents settled sickness
claims with operators' General Public Utilities Corp. and Metropolitan Edison
Co., the owners of TMI.

Their symptoms included
nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from the nose, a metallic taste in the
mouth, hair loss, and red skin rash, typical of acute radiation sickness when
people are exposed to whole-body doses of radiation around 100 rads, Caldicott
said.

David Lochbaum, of the Union
of Concerned Scientists, believes nuclear plant safety standards are lacking
and before Fukushima
predicted another nuclear catastrophe, stating, "It's not if, but when."

"The magnitude of the
radiation generated in a nuclear power plant is almost beyond belief,"
Caldicott writes. "The original uranium fuel that is subject to the
fission process becomes 1 billion times more radioactive in the reactor core. A
thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant contains as much long-lived radiation as
that produced by the explosion of 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs."

Each year, operators must
remove a third of the radioactive fuel rods from their reactors because they
have become contaminated with fission products. The rods are so hot they must
be stored for 30 to 60 years in a heavily shielded building continuously cooled
by air or water lest they burst into flame, and must afterwards be packed into
a container. "Construction of these highly specialized containers
uses as much energy as construction of the original reactor itself, which is 80
gigajoules per metric ton," Caldicott says.

What's a big construction
project, though, when you don't have to pay for it? In the 2005 Energy Bill, Congress
allocated $13 billion in subsidies to the nuclear power industry. Between 1948
and 1998, the US
government showered the industry with $70 billion of taxpayer dollars for
research and development -----corporate Socialism if ever there was any.

Caldicott points out there
are truly green and clean alternative energy sources to nuclear power. She
refers to the American plains as "the Saudi
Arabia of wind," where readily available rural land
in just several Dakota counties "could produce twice the amount of
electricity that the United
States currently consumes."

If we do not grab hold of
such green alternatives, we, like Japan, as Murakami warned, will
“repeat the same mistake again.

(Sherwood Ross is a
Miami-based public relations consultant who also writes on political, social,
and military topics. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)

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